“Ow, ow, ow,” I sobbed. Suddenly, I froze, and that made him even angrier.
“Use your imagine now, girl. Don’t just lay there like a rug and let me do all the work! All this trouble for a little poontang,” he complained between gasps. His foul breath and slimy sweat on my face made the nightmare even worse.
To me the man was unspeakable, but Mama and everybody else held him in the highest regard. Miss Nipp and Reverend Snipes considered him a blessing. On the streets, high-class white people who didn’t even know him greeted him with a smile and called him uncle. He even had the nerve to get his picture on the front page of our newspaper, the Richland Review, with our white mayor. This was after he had written a long, convoluted letter to the city newspaper editor praising the mayor for supporting some welfare program to build more low-income houses. I promised myself that when and if I reached adulthood, I would never involve myself with men. I would surround myself with women and pets.
I couldn’t believe that this man was on top of me. “Yes sir,” I managed, lying under his flabby body, stiff as a plank. I didn’t know what to do with my legs, arms, or any other part of my body. And he didn’t bother to tell me. “I don’t like this,” I told him. “It feels bad.”
“It bees that way sometime,” he said seriously. He paused and moaned with his head thrown back and his eyes closed. I couldn’t believe that there was a smile on his face. He shuddered and opened his eyes and gave me a hard look. “Let’s get this thing over with lickety-split. Lassie is fixin’ to come on the TV.”
“Yes…sir, Mr. Boatwright.” I barely recognized my own voice.
It was raining and thundering and lightning like mad. We usually had a lot of snow this time of year, but not this time. It had snowed a little, but then it quickly turned to slush. Now it was hail. I just lay there crying and listening to the hailstones tapping against my bedroom windows, all the while hating that sweaty, evil man on top of me talking and grunting like a hog. “Rar back,” he instructed.
“Yes, sir,” I managed. Confusion and disgust consumed me. I had to hold my breath to keep from vomiting.
“How that feel?” he asked.
“Bad, I told you,” I said, sobbing.
“Oh don’t you worry about a thing, possum. After we done, go set in a tub of hot water yonder in that bathroom. You can use some of my bubbly bath and sleep under my eiderdown quilt again. And you better not pee on it this time.”
“I did all that the other time, and I still hurt,” I reminded.
“Hush up. At least there ain’t no messy blood this time. Eh?” he said casually.
After he was done with me and I had put my clothes back on, he paid me a nickel and made me promise not to ever tell anybody. He threatened that if I ever told anybody, I would suffer.
“Why you doing this to me?” I wanted to know. “You know I don’t like it,” I sobbed. We were sitting on the side of my bed. He had put his shirt back on, but his pants were still at the foot of my bed.
He patted his wooden leg, then shrugged and looked away from me. After he thought about it for a few moments he turned back to me and shook his head like he really was sorry. But then he suddenly turned mean again. “Don’t you be questionin’ grown folks, Jezebel!”
“Mr. Boatwright, I don’t like what we do,” I whimpered after our latest encounter. He cussed and stopped long enough to chew two Anacin tablets. He swallowed the pills off and on all day, every day, for one thing or another whether he was sick or not. He was nervous because we didn’t know what time Mama was coming home. His clumsy, fake leg had slipped and ended up turned halfway around.
He had greasy, foul-smelling pomade on his hair that had dripped on my face. I helped him adjust his leg straps without him telling me to. I continued talking with my face turned away from his. “I don’t like this, Mr. Boatwright.”
“You ain’t supposed to, possum. Women have too much fun as it is. Shoppin’ all the time. Gossipin’. Cookin’ up some scheme to get one of us to marry y’all.”
“I don’t do none of that,” I informed him. “I don’t like the way this feels.”
“Don’t be such a crybaby. Folks do this all the time, and it ain’t supposed to feel good to no gal. God cursed y’all so it wouldn’t feel good on account of Eve bitin’ a plug out that apple in the Garden of Eden. If you gals was meant to have a good time, God would have gave y’all dicks, too. Shit.”
“God didn’t—” I cried. He interrupted me with a ferocious outburst.
“GOD INVENTED CURSES!” His face became an ugly black mask. He gasped, then he reared back and roared, “That’s why they made him God!”
He stood up from my bed, yawning and stretching his arms high above his head. “Well now. I guess that’ll have to do…” he sighed. He reached over and patted the top of my head. Then he slid into his pants. “Why you so quiet?” he asked casually, hands on his hips. I turned to look at his face, not knowing what I was to say, but he spoke before I could. “You made me do this,” he informed me.
“What?” I gasped. My mouth remained open, and I rubbed my ears. “How did I make you do this, Mr. Boatwright?”
“I seen you struttin’ around in here naked like a peacock one night. Tryin’ to be cute. Showin’ off.”
“How do you know I was in here naked?” I yelled. I attempted to stand, but the glare on his face scared me enough to make me sit back on the bed and lower my voice. “My door was closed.”
Incredibly he said, “What you think they make keyholes for, girl?”
CHAPTER 7
I was now thirteen, and the only person I had ever had any sexual contact with was Mr. Boatwright. Things had not changed much since our first encounter. Every now and then I got up enough nerve to threaten to tell Mama, and he’d usually say something like, “Ahhhh…and who do you think would believe you with your ugly self? What do you think your mama will say when I tell her how you throwed yourself at me for a nickel?”
One night, a week before I turned twelve, I threatened to tell Mama again. I held my breath as he hobbled out of my room and returned within minutes, waving a gun I had never seen before. “See this here?” He walked right up to me and placed the barrel against my forehead. “Bang.”
My heart was beating so hard I could barely breathe. I was too scared to move. He smiled and took a few steps back. “Don’t think I won’t use it.”
Richland’s population remained around thirty-two thousand with approximately a twenty percent Black population. There were two steel mills, a brickyard, and a few other factories that provided decent employment for a lot of the Black men who couldn’t get good-paying jobs anyplace else in town. There were a lot of farms on the outskirts of town where migrant workers from Florida and the Carolinas worked picking mostly beans, strawberries, apples, potatoes and peaches, from May to November. A lot of the local people, mostly Black, worked on those farms, too.
Downtown Richland was nothing to write home about. There were two five-and-dime stores, Pluto’s and Bailey’s, where most of the Black folks did their shopping. There were a few clothing stores, one wig and hat shop, two furniture stores, two shoe stores, a few businesses, and the police station. The more upscale stores were located in Sheldon Village, a large shopping center right off the freeway.
There was only one Black doctor in town and one Black undertaker. Other than Black churches, the only thing there was an abundance of for Black folks were bars. Mama called bars beer gardens. “Them beer gardens cultivate a alcoholic quicker than fertilizer,” she warned me one day when we passed the Red Rose Tavern on the way home from church.
“Amen.” Mr. Boatwright nodded. I figured he had forgotten about the time he had left me standing outside